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As the cost of health care for Americans continues to rise, the system for providing adequate and reasonable effort to ensure the health and well being of the population becomes more complex. Nearly everyone is looking in the wrong direction for answers. Our present system has repetitively proven that the insurance based avenue to good health is exceeding the means available to people everywhere in the country.

The real questions that are seldom addressed regarding health care are not as difficult to sort out as the industry would like us to believe. We should be asking how much it actually costs to meet the physical requirements of providing patient care. This question allows us to focus on what areas of the present system take no actual part in curing an illness, setting a broken bone, or performing an operation. Not one insurance provider actually delivers any direct life saving or health improving procedure, yet they are set up as a multi-billion dollar beneficiary of the health care system. People who are ill can often be denied access to actual health care because they lack financial resources to work around the monetary restrictions imposed by government and insurance companies.

Health care costs are never expressed in terms of the actual costs in equipment, personnel, facility, and drugs needed to accomplish a reasonable effort to maintain the life and health of patients. The true figures for health care costs should eliminate the bureaucratic costs of insurance premiums, and other exorbitant profit centers that do not actually supply any health care goods or services. Once the real cost of health care is established, the next question is who should profit, by how much, and why. There is no doubt that financial gain provides incentives for people to continue working in the health care industry, finding new cures, creating new approaches, and inspiring new ideas for how to address patient needs.

Despite the need for appropriate levels of incentive, limits on consequences for making mistakes, and reasonable assurances that people have equal access to adequate care, a completely capitalistic approach of charging what the market will bear in exchange for people's lives should be limited in ways that are perhaps not applied to other marketable commodities. For this reason, the role of government is to ascertain how much the lives of citizens are worth, and how large the rewards should be for doing the best possible job at keeping people healthy. People who supply pharmaceuticals, equipment, facilities, and actual care for other people should be able to make a living equal to their level of dedication, but not equal to holding the rest of the population hostage in exchange for their lives.

To reform our health care system, we are facing a crossroad in deciding how much of our real income should be spent on keeping us alive, what entities should be receiving those funds, and who should be required to look elsewhere for a way to make exorbitant profits. When health care is predicated on funneling the right to life based on the wealth of a small segment of the population, it violates the role of government and medicine in our pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Our current health care system needs more than a temporary band aid to correct the approach to how people access what they need. Present insurance and health tax savings programs are primarily benefiting insurance companies and government before these funds even begin to reach the level of health care providers. Removing these barriers to direct care provisions could provide billions of dollars worth of incentives to the needs of the health care industry. Regulating profits of drug companies and reducing barriers to alternative medical approaches could add billions more to how people receive the care they need to stay healthy. Reforming the legal involvement with health care, and providing adequate provisions for informing patients of risks associated with medical procedures should also be included with any adequate approach to health care reform.

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Source: www.articlecity.com